Easy to uncover, difficult to stabilize

Ken: This morning I’m going to try to do two things, talk about the three jewels, buddha, dharma, and sangha, because these are the very basis of practice and what Buddhism is about. And the second is to talk about appropriate efforts for the student. And that’s one of the reasons I elected to use the three jewels as a framework. And I think we’ll start from the inside out. By that I mean, when we rest deeply in experience—and this actually means to rest quite deeply in experience—we find a couple of things happen. The first is any sense of being a self in opposition to experience disappears. Right now we have such an idea that, “I’m here and I am conscious of this, “so I–other, and there are many levels of conditioning there, but the more deeply we rest in experience, the more tenuous that sense of I becomes. And I think Buddha’s great insight was there’s actually nothing there at all.

This is in the scheme of things not that difficult an experience to uncover. Milarepa once said, “It’s quite easy to have a glimpse of pure being. It’s really difficult to stabilize it. That’s a lifetime’s work.” This is what the term empty, which is used in Mahayana Buddhism all the time [refers to]. We say mind is empty. We can also say experience is empty. It just arises, there is no thing there. There’s not only not an individual self, an I, but when we you rest deeply in experience, one begins to see that there’s nothing to experience either. Right now [when] anger comes up, it feels like something really solid, and a crisis comes up in your life and this actually exists, and something has to be done, and it has to be this way, and it all becomes very rigid and very concrete.

Buddha: being awake

Ken: But the more deeply you rest in experience, the more you see that nothing is absolute. Things come and go, and they come and go in relationship with each other. And it’s kind of mysterious and kind of wonderful and [you] begin to see more and more that the problem comes from trying to hold onto things, hold onto a sense of self, hold onto a given experience, keep a certain experience away, whatever. But it’s all open. It’s all empty. Not in the sense—this is very important—not in the sense there’s nothing there, but in the sense that there’s nothing to anything. It’s different. That’s buddha, [pause] that’s being awake, which is what buddha means

Buddha was sometimes asked, and he wasn’t called Buddha—we have that in the sutras, of course—but he was probably called Gautama Shakyamuni. So it’d be like, “Hey, Gautama, what makes you different from everybody else?” and he would say, “I’m awake”. And he never claimed to have the answer to anything. Or in fact, there’s a list of questions that he wouldn’t answer. We say this is a possible way of just being awake, which is experiencing things as they are without the projection of thought and emotion. That’s what he meant by being awake. And when we’re awake, we, we know that there’s just arising of experience, and there isn’t a self that opposes or rises in opposition to that, that’s buddha.

Dharma: the clarity of our natural knowing

Ken: And as I said, that emptiness isn’t nothing, because there’s this knowing quality, there’s this potential to know, this clarity. And that’s another thing that happens when we rest in experience: things become clear. How many of you, when you’ve been meditating, some niggling thought about a little problem has come up and you’ve gone, “Oh, that’s what I need to do.” It’s not meant to happen, that’s kind of a distracting thought, but it happens all the time. As the mind rests, things become clear. And so there’s this clarity to this quality of no thingness, and it’s just there. You can’t say, “Well, it’s like a light bulb,” or … one uses different metaphors, crystal and mirror and all kinds of things, but it really is quite indescribable. But we discover that in this emptiness of being there’s this extraordinary clarity. That’s the dharma, because that clarity sees things as they are, and because things are seen as they are, you know what to do. And the word dharma–in ancient times, if you bought a box of cereal or you bought some little kit, it would have the dharma on it–that just means instructions of what to do with it. So this word dharma, it’s just like, “What do you do?” That’s really what the dharma is about, and it’s the clarity of the natural knowing that is our nature.

Sangha: knowing how to relate to experience

Ken: Now, when you have that openness, emptiness, and that clarity, guess what happens? Experience arises. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations; those are the components of experience. We have physical sensations: pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, and objects of the senses: forms, sounds, tastes, touches. We tend to regard these things as belonging to the properties of objects that we regard as external, but actually they’re just components of experience. Then there’s all the thoughts chattering around all over the place. But that’s what experience consists of, just those three things. And they arise all the time. They don’t stop: the quality which is referred to as unceasing. That’s the sangha, [pause] all of that experience because you have to deal with it. There it is. But when you rest in the knowing which isn’t organized around a sense of self, there is a clarity so that as experience arises, you know what it is and you know how to relate to it.

So we have these three aspects of our being if you wish–empty, clear, unimpeded, unity of experience and awareness: buddha, dharma, sangha. That’s really what the three jewels are about. You’ll find that in the Tibetan tradition. In the Zen tradition they don’t like to talk about these things, but you can find it there if you push them hard enough. And, you’ll find it in the Theravadan tradition. In fact, this particular formulation comes from a friend of mine, Ajahn Amaro, but you find it everywhere.

The Tibetans, following the Indians, always like to make things as complex and intricate as possible. So we’re gonna take another look at three jewels, which comes out a different way.

Buddha: revealing presence

Ken: When we start, we don’t know what it means to be present. And so the possibility of presence for most of us is revealed through another person, the teacher. It can be revealed in a number of different ways, by the person’s behavior, through what you yourself come to understand by hanging around this person. There are all kinds of different ways it can be revealed, and that’s the essential role of the teacher. And you may recall the comments I made about Buddha’s last words, “I’ve shown you the way”, and that’s all that the teacher does, reveals possibilities; possibilities which, in our benighted confusion we might not have been able to discern. And there’s a huge mystery here.

At the three year retreat, at one point his holiness Karmapa 16th came to visit us in the retreat, and he gave us some instruction. Now, his holiness was a pretty powerful guy, and when he was giving you instruction in the nature of mind, he was not always very subtle. And this instruction was delivered with such power in his presence that it was basically like being picked up by your collar, and said, “Here’s the nature of mind”, and then being thrown against a wall. “Did you get it?” “No.” “Well, here it is again,” and he threw you again [laughs]. Now, you’ve all had this instruction, you’ve all heard it.

After that it was a very, very powerful experience.When I was back in my room. “Okay, what did he actually say?” It could be boiled down to this one sentence: “Thoughts come and go.” Have any of you ever heard that? [Laughter]

But this is what I mean about the mystery and about the role of the teacher. We’ve all heard this phrase, “Thoughts come and go”. Well, Descartes got it completely screwed up. “Thoughts come, that means I exist,” totally wrong. As a proof of existence, it is just completely wrong. Sent western philosophy down the wrong alleyway for several centuries. Thoughts come and go. How often do you let thoughts come and go? Grab, grab, grab, grab, grab. That’s the problem. When you’re sitting practicing, there we’re doing a little bit of letting thoughts come and go. If thoughts come and go, who are you? “I, there’s the rub,” as Hamlet would say. If we actually lived thoughts come and go, we would live without any sense of an individual self.

So on the one hand, there’s nothing mysterious or obscure or secret or anything like that. What the teacher does, he just tells you how things actually are. The mystery comes when we begin to live that, because we begin to appreciate that life itself is a mystery and only has meaning when we are in the experience of it. Any sense of standing back and it becomes an idea. So the whole thrust of practice then is to be able to relate to experience completely.

Dharma: relating to experience completely

Ken: Now, in the Tibetan tradition there is a particular method for relating to experience completely. In its in its full form, it’s actually quite involved and very complex, but I’m just going to boil it down to its essential quality. Take any aspect of experience, and what’s useful here is to take the aspects that you get hung up on. And we usually get hung up on one of three things: an ideal, a personality trait or an emotional reaction. Yeah, wars are fought over ideals. So we can say people get hung up on them. People become very attached to certain traits and their personality. And attached can mean to test them as well.And then there’s all of the emotional reactions, which we’re getting stuck on all the time.

So here’s where the dharma comes in, relating to experience completely. Well, very interesting things happen then. For instance, you take a typical emotional reaction, say, wanting to be loved. Now, if you go into this completely, you’re going to have to figure out what there is in you to be loved, right? And who’s going to do all of that loving? And as with any facet of our experience, the more deeply you go into it, the less you find to hold onto. And you find in the case of wanting to be loved, it means that the only way to do that, to meet that, is to be completely open to all of experience yourself. In other words, to love everything. And we find that this turn happens over and over again when we go in to experience.

Anger, the other thing, well, if you’re going to be angry, you’ve got to be angry at something. You can’t be angry at nothing. So to really go into that, you’ve gotta find what you’re angry at. And because anger has so much energy, the more that you go into it, the more difficult it is to find anything to be angry at, but the clearer and clearer your mind grows. So this is what it means to go into your experience completely. And that’s the dharma.

Sangha: knowing what to do

Ken: And the sangha from this point of view, it’s the knowing which knows what to do in even the most difficult circumstances. In time and time again, you hear a person say, “I don’t know if I can handle this,” popular expression these days. Well, it’s nonsense. You’re always going to handle it. The only question is how. You can handle it as a reaction, or you can handle it out of one’s natural knowing. But to do that, you’re going to have to relate to the totality of your experience. You won’t be able to leave anything out. And now we’re back into the sangha again, all of that experience. And the way you do this in practice is you open to everything. And I’ve done this with many, many people in individual sessions.

A particularly striking example is, I was facilitating a group at a corporation where I’m doing some consulting. And one person arrived late for the meeting and he had a crucial role in the meeting. He arrived about 10 minutes late and said, “Just let me get here.” And he had to say something, so he said, “I’m just trying to get everything out of my mind so I can focus on being here.” And he was struggling. And because I’ve done individual coaching with him, I said, “Look, don’t try to push that stuff out of your mind. Just open to it all. It’s all there, all the mess, all the confusion, all the pressures you got to take care of as soon as this meeting’s over. Just open to it all right now.” And he stopped, and he did. And now he was here, and so we could proceed. But our ordinary way of functioning is we try to push that stuff away. No. You’ve got to include everything and rely on the knowing that arises right there. And it’s different from how most people try to do things, because that’s another take on the three jewels.

When knowing becomes alive in our own experience

Ken: And then there’s the traditional take. Buddha refers to Buddha Shakyamuni, the teacher, who discovered that it’s possible to know that one doesn’t exist as a thing, and not die in the process, at least not die physically. And down to the present day, 2,500 years later, the significance of that opening—or discovery, or whatever you want to call it—resonates with such power that we’re all here today. We have to be very careful here. There’s nothing that has been passed down in terms of an understanding. That understanding is what each of us is. And as Buddha said, it’s up to each of us to work out our own freedom, to discover this ability or aspect to our being for ourselves. Hearing about it from somebody else and getting instruction, all that does is open the possibility for us and give us the tools. It doesn’t mean anything until it becomes alive in our own experience. And that’s what the dharma is about.